View from the Top

Barbara Walters, photographed in the library of her Manhattan apartment.

From Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, Katharine Hepburn to Beyoncé Knowles, and Truman Capote to Tom Cruise, journalist and TV host Barbara Walters has interviewed just about every person of importance, in every profession and walk of life, during her illustrious, glass-ceiling-breaking career. On the eve of her retirement, Walters reflects on her iconic six decades in the field.

Barbara Walters does not like to be interviewed. This fact, which is either richly ironic or entirely unsurprising—and maybe both—is one she announces early and often during our afternoon together, first mentioning it as we ride in a chauffeured S.U.V. from the ABC studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to have lunch on the terrace of the restaurant in the Mark Hotel, near her Upper East Side apartment. “I hate it,” she says of being on the receiving end of another journalist’s questions. “You will find that I’m very hard to interview.”

Over shrimp-and-avocado salads at the restaurant, Walters is willfully, endearingly uncooperative. After I say more than once that I’d “be remiss” in not inquiring about particular topics, she says, only half joking, “Anything you feel you’d be remiss about, don’t ask.” At another point, she complains of the conversation we are having about her, “This is boring!” And I truly test her patience with questions about her legacy. “If you ask me once more how I see myself—I do not sit down and see myself!” she declares. “Do I see myself as a feminist idol? No. I don’t see myself as anything. I do not see myself as a trailblazer. I don’t think about that. I get up, and I do my day, and I do my work, and I see friends. But I don’t sit and think about how I see myself, or what my legacy is.”

Point taken. However, if Walters declines to toot her own horn, there are plenty of others to do it for her. “She was an early ballbuster, and I mean that in the nicest possible way,” Katie Couric said of Walters. “She rattled a lot of cages before women were even allowed into the zoo.”

Sherri Shepherd, one of Walters’s co-hosts on The View, said, “I think every talk show where you see more than one person of color is due to Barbara Walters. In the landscape of network TV, you would always see one black person, and it was the foresight and creative vision of Barbara Walters who said, ‘You know what? Maybe all black people don’t think alike.’ ” And for anyone tempted to dismiss Walters, by invoking Gilda Radner’s mid-70s “Baba Wawa” impersonation, consider that at the same time, Walters was doing groundbreaking work in the Middle East, including her unprecedented 1977 joint interview with former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

On May 16 Walters will retire from appearing on television (she will still serve, with her longtime business partner, Bill Geddie, as The View’s co–executive producer). At this point, Walters is so woven into the history and present of television—which is to say the history and present of our nation and our national culture—that it’s as if she’s hiding in plain sight. She’s interviewed icons including Bing Crosby and curiosities du jour, including, most recently, V. Stiviano, the female companion of disgraced Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Her own fame has outlasted that of most of her subjects (Mary Kay Letourneau, Mr. T), though she’s also talked to nearly every current A-lister (Beyoncé Knowles, Angelina Jolie, Tina Fey), as well as legends from the past such as Truman Capote and Maria Callas, athletes like Tiger Woods and Andre Agassi, political leaders (Yitzhak Rabin, Indira Gandhi), and every sitting president and First Lady from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama.

Walters attributes her comfort with, and understanding of, public figures to her unusual upbringing: her father, Lou Walters, an immigrant from England, owned a chain of nightclubs called the Latin Quarter. The Walters family moved from Boston to Miami to New York, as the franchise expanded, and Barbara, who is now in her 80s, grew up amid singers, showgirls, acrobats, and comedians. From her perch in the lighting booth, she was always aware that “behind these fantasy figures were real people” who had genuine problems like everyone else.

Joy Behar, a co-host on The View from the program’s inception until last summer, told me she suspected Walters’s ability to focus was honed in nightclubs. “When she’s at the show, she’s ‘on,’ ” Behar said. “And yet, when you see her on a plane, she has her glasses on. She sits by the window and just reads. And I remember people telling me, when her father owned the Latin Quarter, the comedians would come in and out. It must have been tumult all the time. And a couple of them told me they remember seeing the young Barbara in the corner, with her glasses, reading.”

As the popularity of nightclubs decreased—ironically enough, due in large part to the rise of television—Lou Walters found himself deeply in debt. When Barbara was 28, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College working in the radio-and-television department of a public-relations firm, her father intentionally overdosed on sleeping pills; it was Barbara who rode with him in the ambulance to the hospital. Upon discovering that her father owed taxes he couldn’t pay, it also was Barbara who helped untangle the ensuing legal and financial complications and began providing financial assistance to her father, mother, and older sister, who had cognitive disabilities.

“In my 20s, when I should have been having this wonderful time, I was working and supporting my family,” Walter says now, recalling Sarah Lawrence classmates who lived in chic apartments and wore designer clothes. “Now, let me tell you what’s important about that. Most men, if they hated the job, or if it was boring to them or beneath them, they had to work. The women didn’t. So the women got married or they took time off or they took a trip, if they had the wherewithal. I had to work. That’s the difference. That’s why I am where I am today.”

Walters claimed over lunch, “My whole being in front of the camera is such an amazing accident.” Hired in 1961 to be a temporary writer and on-the-air reporter for the Today show, Walters was, by 1966, the show’s first unofficial female co-host (she became the permanent co-host in 1974); she is fond of insisting that her rise was attributable less to her beauty or talent than to the fact that, after a series of so-called Today Girls didn’t work out, execs turned to her because she was a known quantity who would work cheaply. A decade later, she jumped to ABC to be the first female co-anchor of the evening news on any network; though that role was brief, it gave rise to her famous specials, featuring heads of state, convicted criminals, Hollywood royalty, and all combinations thereof. For 25 years, Walters co-hosted 20/20, and since 1997, she has been the creator and co-executive producer and co-host of The View. Throughout, Walters has remained a correspondent for ABC News, and it was in that capacity that, for example, she interviewed George Zimmerman’s parents last July.

Walters is clearly proud of how long the specials, and particularly The10 Most Fascinating People special lasted, “The interviews have a texture to them that I think has been unique,” she said, though she harbors one regret, which is that she didn’t travel to South Africa in 1994 to personally interview Nelson Mandela. “It was November, which was sweeps,” Walters recalls. “I was just so busy and I didn’t think I could spare that four days traveling, the interview, a week—and I’m kicking myself.”

For Walters and Geddie, selecting the group was always more art than science; from New Year’s Day to Thanksgiving, they’d keep a running list of more than 100 possibilities and often make 11th-hour changes if whoever felt like a defining personality back in February didn’t radiate relevance come November. They did no formal polling, but, Walters says, “If you’re delivering the turkey sandwich, we ask your opinion. I might say, ‘Hi. How’s the turkey sandwich? Did you ever hear of so-and-so? You did? What do you think of him?’ ”

Walters had first been captivated by the Middle East when visiting Israel in 1973, for the 25th anniversary of the country’s founding. On that trip, she had interviewed not only former Prime Minister Golda Meir, but also Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, with whom she formed a lasting friendship. (Dayan’s widow, Raquel, would wear to her husband’s 1981 funeral a dress that belonged to Walters.) The historic nature of what was at stake for Israel and its neighbors, as well as the powerful and charismatic personalities of the players, made it irresistible; to this day, Walters says her all-time favorite interviewee was then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

After her 1977 joint interview with Sadat and Israel’s Begin, she wanted to hold a similar joint interview with the Egyptian and Israeli ambassadors, in the United States. Because Egypt and Israel had been at war since 1948, the two men had never met, and the Egyptian ambassador, Ashraf Ghorbal, didn’t want to be in the presence of his Israeli counterpart, Simcha Dinitz, for the first time on television. Walters held an off-the-record dinner for them at a hotel in Washington, an elite gathering also attended by William Safire, Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, Katharine Graham, and Henry Kissinger.

Walters was at (or, as it were, just outside) Camp David, when Sadat and Begin signed the Peace Accords, in September 1978. She was in Jerusalem with Begin, in March 1979, when word came from Cairo that Sadat, meeting with President Carter, had agreed to sign the treaty that had emerged from the accords; Walters and her crew then raced to Egypt, flying through Cyprus because direct flights from Israel were illegal, and at Sadat’s residence in Giza the crew threw pebbles at his window at 11 P.M. in the hope he’d come out and talk. (He didn’t.) Walters nevertheless reported from outside the residence at two A.M., before finally heading to a hotel, where she and three colleagues shared twin beds. Of being a woman in such settings, Walters says, “It never got in my way, and I’m not so sure that in some places, like with Castro, it didn’t help.” (But, no, she says, despite the lingering rumors, she and the Cuban revolutionary never slept together.)

In more ways than one, Walters believes that such international excitement is part of the past. The public interest in world leaders is greatly diminished, she says, and even the leaders themselves are less charismatic. “There is no Fidel Castro, except for Fidel Castro,” she told me over lunch. “It’s not his brother, and it’s not his cousin. There is no Middle East leader like Sadat. There is no one like Margaret Thatcher. There are no huge world leaders that [make] people [say], ‘Oh, if you could only get an interview with so-and-so!’ If I got an interview with so-and-so, and I brought it back, [producers would] say, ‘We’ll give him two and a half minutes on G.M.A.’ It’s like visiting a country and nobody wears a native costume anymore. Maybe everybody’s just too similar. We’re reading the same things; we’re watching the same things. I can’t think of a world leader—I’m trying very hard—that everybody is dying to interview. I guess the closest you’ll come to it now is Hillary Clinton.”

Walters laments the decline of the TV newsmagazine, especially as a home for serious interviews. Her 2011 exclusive interview with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is a reminder of Walters’s chops, with her forcefully questioning Assad about being “a dictator and a tyrant,” as well as about brutality toward children under his regime. Whether or not her subsequent attempts to help Assad’s aide to obtain an internship at CNN and gain entry to Columbia University were inappropriate—and Walters has expressed regret over doing so—it doesn’t seem as though she went easy on Assad himself.

“I was one of the first who did political interviews and celebrities,” Walters says of her early career. “And I was criticized for it, and now everybody does it. Now, on the morning shows, the first half-hour is news, and the second half-hour they’re making soufflés, or interviewing a movie star. But when I was doing that, that was unusual.” She said that if ratings didn’t matter she wouldn’t include celebrity guests on The View, though she’s not apologetic about the show’s high-low blend. “We’re not Meet the Press,” she said. “We have an obligation to do a balance and be funny.”

Walters’s on-air manner—and her ability to persuade her interviewees to reveal intimacies on national TV—seems to be a natural extension of her personality. “She is the ultimate girlfriend,” Arianna Huffington says of Walters, who was a bridesmaid in her wedding to Michael Huffington. Walters is the godmother of the Huffingtons’ older daughter, Christina, now 25, and the two have regular get-togethers, after one of which Christina asked her mother, “Why do I always cry when I have lunch with Barbara?”

Walters’s View colleague Sherri Shepherd tells of similarly cozy dinners, though the prospect of dining one-on-one with her legendary boss initially intimidated her. “But it’s just two women talking,” Shepherd says. “She’s very curious about your life. She gives me advice, and I always feel like I never want the dinner to end. I want to go home with Barbara, curl up under the covers with her, and watch old black-and-white movies.” Walters has helped Shepherd find schools and doctors for her son, who has special needs, and threw Shepherd’s bridal shower when she re-married, in 2011, telling Shepherd’s fiancé, Lamar Sally, “If you hurt Sherri, I’m going to hurt you.” Sally laughed, Shepherd recalls, but Walters just looked at him.

Walters has been married four times to three men—she married, divorced, re-married, and re-divorced her third husband, Merv Adelson, C.E.O. of the now defunct television production company Lorimar, in an 11-year span—and has enjoyed an array of high-profile suitors, including Alan Greenspan, Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke (who was married at the time), and Virginia senator John Warner. With her second husband, Lee Guber, she adopted a daughter, Jackie, who is now in her 40s and whom Walters obviously treasures—to the point of keeping her off-limits to reporters. Walters has no grandchildren; her family is extremely small. And yet, if none of Walters’s marriages lasted—to hear her tell it, they all ended amicably, even quietly—her personal and professional relationships have been rich and enduring. In addition to working with Geddie for 25 years, she has enjoyed similar stretches with other producers, as well as her publicist, hairstylist, makeup artist, and live-in staff of two at home.

She says that the first and last time she “lost it” in an interview was in 1982, becoming flustered when Clint Eastwood flirted with her on-camera. In fact, Walters jokingly suggested as the headline for this article “I Could Have Been Mrs. Clint Eastwood.” (This was shortly before she offered—twice—to write the article for me.) A few weeks after our lunch, news broke that Eastwood had separated from his wife, Dina. In a phone conversation, Walters told me, “I read that the other day, and I laughed. I thought, Oh, he’s available. But, no, I did not think of calling him, and by the way, he did not think of calling me.”

As she looks toward her retirement, Walters doesn’t have particularly clear plans. She refers to sitting “in a sunny field” and says with a laugh, “Mostly, I just sort of want to stay home.” She neither has nor wants a boyfriend, though she has a full social life and enjoys seeing Broadway shows and holding dinner parties at both her apartment, overlooking Central Park, and the house she rents in the Hamptons.

The notion of Barbara Walters simply relaxing is almost unfathomable, given her pace and drive over the last six decades. During her Today-show years, Walters set two alarm clocks every weekday for 4:30 A.M. (She says the prostitutes who congregated on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street would mistake her for one of their own, imagining she’d just left a client in a nearby hotel, and taking inspiration in the sight of her climbing into a limousine.) To stay abreast of current events and sniff out possible interviewees, she has always read three or four newspapers a day, as well as an assortment of magazines. She still reads an entire book in order to ask its author one question, in a four-minute segment on The View. She doesn’t always enjoy doing homework, she told me, “But I’m not comfortable, if I don’t.”

Walters’s ethos has had a ripple effect on those around her. Shortly after starting on The View, in 2007, Sherri Shepherd said on-air, in what she now attributes to nervousness, that she didn’t know if the earth was round or flat. In the ensuing uproar, Walters told her of being a co-host, “If I didn’t think you could do this, I would not have asked you.” Shepherd says now, “She allowed me to grow and make mistakes and said, ‘Get back up, read the newspaper, read books, so people won’t say you need to be fired. I have faith in you.’ ” Shepherd began transcribing the presidential debates in their entirety (she used to be a fast-typing legal secretary), while she watched them at night. She then researched any issues she wasn’t familiar with “so that when Barbara said the next morning, ‘Did any of you watch the debate?’ I knew I was going to be raising my hand.”

To woo interviewees, Walters sent handwritten notes and sometimes visited them multiple times; it’s not by accident that she got all those gets, and in cases where she didn’t succeed—with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana, for instance, both of whom she met with repeatedly—it wasn’t for lack of trying.

“Oftentimes I would compete with her for interviews, and you do not want to be on the losing end,” Katie Couric told me, before laughingly adding, “Or the winning end.” After the 1995 equestrian accident that left Christopher Reeve paralyzed, Couric recalled that she “desperately” wanted to interview Reeve and his wife, Dana, but when the couple chose instead to speak with Walters, “it made all the sense in the world,” given Walters’s iconic status.

“There’s a reason she’s been doing this for as long as she’s been doing it,” Couric said. “She’s a fierce competitor. She’s Barbara Walters. It’s pretty hard to go against that.”

In 1998, Walters landed what is perhaps her most famous get: Monica Lewinsky, whose interview was seen by a record-breaking audience of 74 million, making it the most watched news interview ever. Lewinsky could have made millions of dollars off a paid interview that would have helped with her legal bills, but chose instead to go with Walters. In an e-mail, she described her experience:

My first television interview—ever—was with Barbara in 1999. Still reeling from other “firsts” experienced in the year prior (becoming a news story, threats of jail, subpoenas, grand juries, impeachment trial, etc.), I was somewhat shell-shocked, and the full import of being interviewed by her—and as my first—did not sink in until years later. She takes her work very seriously and approached this interview with the journalistic professionalism one would expect. But not far behind, was an intention to introduce me to the world as more than a headline or punchline—as a human being and a young woman. People tuned in to the interview not just because they were curious about me, but because it was going to be through Barbara Walters’s trusted perspective.

Walters has traveled to the far corners of the earth for absurdly short lengths of time—three two-day stints in China, a one-day visit to Australia. Before cell phones, she would sit all day in a foreign hotel room, waiting to hear if an interview was going to happen. In preparation for a particular interview, she generated dozens of questions and wrote them on index cards, continuing to revise until the second filming started. “People sometimes say to me, ‘Who writes your questions?’ ” Walters told me. “And I think, Who writes my questions? I write my own stuff, and I can write the way I talk.”

Sherwood, of Walters’s trip to Syria to interview Assad, said, “This woman prepares and prepares and prepares. All the way from here to Damascus, and then all the way to the presidential palace, and all the way into the presidential palace, through the layers of security, and then all the way into the room where she was interviewing Assad, I can tell you that she was working and reworking and reworking those questions. For all of us on this side who know what it takes to get the Most Fascinating [People] on, or an Oscar special, or a big interview, it’s an incredible amount of work and she is always there. She is the one who puts her hand up and says, ‘I’ll come in at two in the morning, if you need me to update the West Coast on that piece I did.’ ”

According to Behar, at The View, Walters forbids complaints about being tired. “Because she had worked her butt off all her life and didn’t have the luxury to be tired,” Behar said. “So she would not tolerate, ‘Oh my goodness, you feel tired? You’re only here from nine to 12. What the hell are you talking about?’ ”

Both Behar and Shepherd say that, following Walters’s lead, none of The View co-hosts use the bathroom while at the studio; Walters claims to have the bladder of a camel, and in deference to their leader the other women hold it in. “If you ever see me fidgeting at the table, it’s ’cause I have to go,” Shepherd says.

Walters acknowledges that her relentless drive probably backfired on her at times. In the past, she says that people “thought I was very serious, very authoritative, and pushy. There were no shades in my personality, because I was asking the questions and I was in control. And I do my own editing when I can, and I would be writing my own introductions. I was sort of a one-man band.”

The ultimate compliment to Walters is that, once you start watching her, it’s hard to stop—and, fundamentally, isn’t that the true test of successful television? On her “sizzle reel,” a seven-minute greatest-hits video produced by ABC and narrated by Oprah Winfrey, clips show Walters interviewing luminaries such as Colin Powell (“When you learned that you had been misled, how did you feel?”), Bill Gates (“You have for years been called a nerd. Do you care? Does it hurt you?”), and Hillary Clinton (“How could you stay in this marriage?”). And here’s the undeniable reflection of how incredibly good Walters is, and always has been, at what she does—that, although millions and millions of us first saw these interviews years ago, when she asks her questions, even now, we still want to hear the answers.